Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday May 16, 2011 @03:01PM
from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-internet dept.

eldavojohn writes "Friday on CNBC, Bill Clinton gave an interview that is causing some unrest on popular news sites today. When asked if there is a role for government in terms of ensuring that the information out there is accurate, he replied, 'Well, I think it would be a legitimate thing to do. ... If the government were involved, I think you'd have to do two things ... I think number one, you'd have to be totally transparent about where the money came from. And number two, you would have to make it independent. ... let's say the US did it; it would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn't think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out. That is, it would be like, I don't know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors. And also, they would also have to have citations so that they could be checked in case they made a mistake.' His statements have elicited responses ranging from a Ministry of Truth a la 1984 to discussion of genuine concern about internet rumors and falsehoods."

This is a superb idea, the internet is so full of half-truths and
outright lies it makes my head spin.

A prime example was the flood of
pro-vaccine nonsense that was obviously spread by Big Pharma soon after Dr.
Andrew Wakefield's brilliant research into vaccine-caused autism was all but
shredded. Alternative medicine caregivers (homeopaths, chiropractors,
naturopaths, accupuncurists, among others) have all been treating vaccine
induced autism. WE'RE IN THE FRONT LINES! But some well placed lies soon
spread as truth.

How about another? The LIES that Chiropractic neck
manipulation can cause strokes. How do they know? They don't! This LIE
was conceived by BIG PHARMA. They sell all the OtC pain remedies to
unsuspecting sheep. Neck (Cervical) manipulation has cured MILLIONS of
people of chronic headaches, migraine, sinus blockages and other maladies
that BIG PHARMA sells you drugs for.

Sorry if this comes across as a
rant, I'm only allowed to post two times a day. This is because of the BIG
PHARMA drug pushers who constantly vote me down rather than have a proper,
adult discussion with me.

The sooner they get someone in power who
can regulate the internet, not some fancy 'scientist', but a true medial
professional, the better.

Uh...I think you missed the point of that post. He's not engaging in brilliant and cutting satire...he's nutjob, tinfoil hat serious. Check out his post history, it's all the same paranoid conspiracy, anti-big pharma, anti vax nonsense.

The fact that it's indistinguishable from hilarious satire tells us something about the value of context...yikes.

I know you are trolling, and I even crack a smile sometimes, but have you stopped and considered that there are people more credulous and less informed than what you expect? Even if one paranoid parent withholds vaccine from his child because of your crap, wouldn't it outweight the shits and giggles we got from it?

Hey, I did not appeal to the force of the law! Of course, what Dr.Bob DC is doing is legal. But morally, I don't think he should be doing it. No, we should not be jailing those saying what we do not like. But since when is it censorship to try to change their mind?!

Of course, what Dr.Bob DC is doing is legal. But morally, I don't think he should be doing it.

And you reach that conclusion on the back of a 'if it saves even one life it's worth it' argument. Which is a crock of shit. Which is what I actually said. Lives are not of infinite value. There are many things that are not worth it even if it saves one life, a dozen lives, or a thousand lives.

Even if one paranoid parent withholds vaccine from his child because of your crap, wouldn't it outweight the shits and giggles we got from it?

To answer your rhetorical question in terms you can understand: No. It wouldn'

I really hope you're just deep in character for an ongoing epic troll. Really. If the opinions you express are typical of Chiropractic practitioners then it's little wonder it is shunned as quackery by those involved in science-based medicine.

Sorry if this comes across as a rant, I'm only allowed to post two times a day. This is because of the BIG PHARMA drug pushers who constantly vote me down rather than have a proper, adult discussion with me.

No, it's because you come across as a rant and that's why you're voted down. That, and batshit crazy.

I can understand Americans who are paranoid of the influence of Big Pharma because of just how much pull that industry has in your country. However, said industry does not have such a pull in most other countries.

How is it you can write something off as just being Big Pharma manipulating the system, when every other country is also vaccinating?

Well, in one sense, I do suspect that people are treating him as saying something he did not. It sounds like he was talking about a hypothetical, government funded organization that researches and reports truthfulness of other reports by giving evidence and citations. He's not saying to use a government department to block anything regarded as "false". Does not seems much different than a highly constrained version of the BBC, CBC, ABC (Australian) and other government channels you don't have to pay attenti

Actually, I heard a brief clip of the interview on the radio this morning-- it was his voice. He did say this.

That being said, he didn't suggest it-- he was asked if there was a role, and he went off on a hypothetical about IF you were to do it, you'd have to have these safeguards in place. He was not saying that it was something that we should do.

The trouble is that you have to approach these grains-of-salt sites and the like with a grain of salt. The idea of a "fact agency" sounds very tempting as a quick fix, and I'm certain that if such a thing were created, it would do wonders at the beginning. But once there's a fair amount of public trust in it, that's when the potential for abuse becomes great.

Or if I'm part of the Borg Collective? Or if I'm body-snatched? Or if I've drunk the water? Or some other science fiction metaphor that's handy to throw about until you have to explain why you're using it?

Quite apart from all the other good reasons why this is a BAD idea, it is another way to wase money a broke country dosn't have.

First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income [wikipedia.org], and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes [wikipedia.org]. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.

Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org [factcheck.org] and polifact.com [polifact.com], for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures [bbc.co.uk], for a complete news organization with international coverage.

Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.

"Besides, the country isn't broke, just horrible at distributing wealth."

Our country takes in $2.5T in revenues each year, spends about $4.3T, and has so far racked-up just over $14.3T in debt.

If we scale those numbers down to the personal level (slide the decimal point a few places to the left), that would be like a person that earns $25K/yr spending $43K/yr, and is carrying $143K in unsecured debt.

I'd call that person broke, why is it different when a country is in the same straits?

"Besides, the country isn't broke, just horrible at distributing wealth."

Our country takes in $2.5T in revenues each year, spends about $4.3T, and has so far racked-up just over $14.3T in debt.

If we scale those numbers down to the personal level (slide the decimal point a few places to the left), that would be like a person that earns $25K/yr spending $43K/yr, and is carrying $143K in unsecured debt.

I'd call that person broke, why is it different when a country is in the same straits?

Because you can ask why a country isn't collecting more than $2.5T to make up the difference, but you can't ask a high school drop out why they aren't making more than $25K a year because, well, they can't (generalization alert). The point that AC was trying to make was that part of why we're only collecting $2.5T is that we hand out over-sized tax cuts to rich individuals (tax cuts that weren't necessary to drive the dot-com boom) as well as to many business not in need of such support or incentives (such

Yes, obviously, there's the Ministry of Truth aspect to it. However, when I want to find out what the real deal is about the latest flu pandemic, you know where I go? cdc.gov. If I want to find out what the story is around the latest federal budget numbers, I go to cbo.gov. If I want raw country data, I go to cia.gov.

There are already plenty of times where some numbers geeks are holed up in a government office, crunching numbers and nothing but numbers. Is there a risk of political influencing? Sure is. You just have to look at FEMA for one of the most egregious examples of political horse trading. But you can set up an organization in such a way as to minimize political influence.

There are really three areas where I would like to see an official government agency providing a central information clearinghouse:* a history of political events (who said what, where and when)* a history of detailed public office budgets (down to who makes how much)* a general list of current hoaxes and misinformation. Think of it as Snopes done.gov style.

Yes, all of that would obviously be done from the perspective of the government, and with associated biases and perspectives. But it would provide an easy place to get that kind of information, rather than having to trawl through countless soundbites presented by various other organizations.

I think Snopes has been caught out on some hot political issues. They are great for debunking urban legends. But there is FactCheck.org [factcheck.org], PolitiFact [politifact.com], and to a lesser extent The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com].

In 1984, the Ministry of Truth is a propaganda body. They do not provide citations. They do not check facts. They decide what the truth is to be. I totally agree with the points you've made, but I think it's worth noting that what's being discussed here is not related to the Ministry of Truth in 1984. The Ministry of Truth is more like how the Nazis did news, and also more like how various modern news organizations do news. What is being proposed is actually the opposite of the Ministry of Truth

Except that if it's a government agency and the government funds a lot of research (NSF, NIH, etc.), isn't the government already establishing what is factual? It's very easy to fund or not fund research that will likely say or not say what you want. Facts can also be established by perr-review, which sounds better than it is in practice (don't get me wrong, it's great for the most part but if you ever want to do or interpret something differently, it's really hard to get it past peer-review). Even though t

Seriously, all this would do is make an official version of something. The simple truth is, there are always multiple interpretation of things, all of which can be accurate. Take an historical example into consideration: the cause of the American Civil War. There are many different interpretations given for the start of the war, and all of them have numbers, figures, and documents to back up the theories. With complicated issues like that, how do you say which is more accurate? Different people can loo

What you are speculating on are theories, not facts. Such is the state of discourse that theories (like the causes of Autism) are not even our biggest problem any more--people just make up numbers and statements that are absolutely, provably false and expect people to believe them. This agency would be first and foremost charged with stating facts such as "the oil industry paid $91.5 billion in U.S. taxes in 2008" (citation [acta.us]), or "President Obama's birth certificate is valid according every relevant author

The best thing the government can do to establish "facts" is to arbitrate disputes involving facts. We're already doing that. We have laws against libel and fraud. Enforce them. End of story.

While it may be a tragedy that some people believe the president was born at an alien base in the African jungle, this doesn't rise to the level of fraud or libel. At least, it hasn't been put to the test AFAIK. Any attempts to outlaw fantasy masque

I think there will always be people who will believe anything they hear and never bother checking the facts even when it is available. These days it's a blog or a tweet; in times past it was over the fence or by telephone. I can't count how many tweets I've read recently about some celebrity's death only that it wasn't true. And these are people who don't believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theory buffs never believe a government agency telling basic facts like water is wet.

One person's fact is another person's fiction. Information can be used in many ways to come to various conclusions. The right and the left can often see something completely different, and yet they both had the same "facts".

What would the Fact Agency have concluded when Mr. Clinton stated that he did not have "sexual relations with that woman." Was he factually correct?

What would the Fact Agency have concluded when Mr. Clinton stated that he did not have "sexual relations with that woman." Was he factually correct?

If they were doing their job, they would have concluded that drawing a conclusion as to the truthfulness of that statement is beyond the scope of their mission. All they would provide is the fact that Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." That's it. That would be their function.

As another example, they would not say, "The Japanese instigated the war with the U.S. by bombing Pearl Harbor." Instead, they would say, "The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor." The former is a conclu

...and in an appropriate way. Say some BS internet rumor gets started. An affected agency will often have a debunking website dedicated to the topic that browsers can easily access. Remember Compean and Ramos, the two border agents the anti-immigration crowd turned into heroes? The DoJ did a great point-by-point debunking [justice.gov] of the interwebz myths about their case. Didn't stop a Bush pardon, unfortunately.

In order for this to work. We will need all the facts who said what and when. Every data point of some statistics, what questions were asked and where. There are a lot of truths out there you can come up with many of them with some correct questions as many people are actually complex individuals you can bring up a lot of truths out there that arn't necessary true.Lets use Abortion as an example I hear from both sides and they say they are in the majority.Now the Anti-Abortion people will direct questions

This whole story is flamebait. Clinton didn't make the suggestion, the interviewer did, and asked him to speculate on it. He isn't actually advocating for a ministry of truth, nor is he even in government anymore.

Same poster as above. As a for example, why is no one complaining that the CEO of AGT is railing against anonymity? He is blatantly, but that's also taking his words out of context, and you know, he isn't Bill Clinton.

The summary also conveniently left this out, "But if it's a government agency in a traditional sense, it would have no credibility whatever"

What is truly frightening is how many people (see comments above) are so willing to jump on this bandwagon. I'm sure some of it is people grasping at straws in hopes that "truthiness" will win but c'mon - this is politics and we ALL lose.

Maybe Mr. Thompson can force Mr. Galt to "fix" that which is broken but I doubt it - not aas long as that force, no matter how benign, comes from "above"..

We already have Web organizations that do a pretty good job of cutting through BS -- Snopes.com and Factchecker.org to name two. The problem is not that we don't have objective arbiters of the truth, but that many people don't want anything other than confirmation of their existing biases and will label any group that doesn't do that as "biased" against their "truth."

Having the government sponsor the Truth Police will not give it any more credibility and may just make it less credible depending on who does

This is one of those things the free market already provides, with the help of numerous news organizations. One of the more useful is Politifact [politifact.com], but there are plenty of others.

Those who don't trust government sources of information won't trust this government agency any more than they trust the various government reports. And they shouldn't: The government source matters, but it should be corroborated by other sources.

Our legislative, and executive bodies have no right to fact check anyones speech! Its a clear violation of the first and tenth amendments, and possibly the fourth depending on what happens as a result of being cited.

There is already a process for fact checking the Internet. Which ever person or organization the facts are relevant to can respond with their own information. If the information is wrong and damages their reputation in some way they can sue for libel. That is why we have courts people!

The government is the worst when it comes to fact finding, checking and reporting. The government claims (in various AdCouncil ads) that cigarettes kill more people than AIDS, car wrecks, heart disease, and cancer combined. Their reasoning is that if you die of heart disease or cancer you may have died from cigarettes ergo you did die from cigarettes even if you had never even seen or smelt a cigarette in your life. And if cigarettes are so god damn deadly why don't they make them illegal? Oh that's righ

"I covered the Clintons for eight years. The one thing I learned about them is that they lie. It's reflexive to them; after decades of the lying that tends to infect the households of addicts, they don't have a normal person's understanding of truth and falsehood."

Well, he's either naive, or lying, when he claims there could even be something like 'an independent federal agency'. For that reason alone this is a dumb, bad, dangerous idea.

It will revolutionize history research. We all know that data is moving more and more to the net. This will centralize it and provide quality control.

You'll just have to consult the official site to determine what truly happened. No mucking about having to weigh the validity of original sources that might have been mistranslated, be biased, or were authored disengenuously to slander someone. No dealing with the vagaries, subjectivity and bother of gathering statements from witnesses to events before they pass away. The savings in travel and time for history, archeology, anthropology and related departments will be most welcome as they tend to be underfunded anyway. They won't have to waste so much time in futile debate over what really happened.

One source and one truth to be written and taught in classrooms.

What a remarkable idea.

Think how easy it makes journalism as well. Why, they'll be able to cut even more of those expensive foreign correspondents that sit around waiting for news to happen.

It certainly will help end the terrible partisanship we have in this country. People will all start from the same set of facts. Why, if we unify the deductive methods applied to them, we can avoid this terrible inefficiency of having people look at the same circumstances and come to different conclusions about it.

Finally, the nation will have clarity rather than this messy confusion.

With the Fairness Doctrine in place, the media present the people who hold the opposing viewpoint as being all nujobs because they select as spokespeople for the opposition the nuts rather than the reasonable people. When we had it politics was more civil and less responsive.
When the Fairness Doctrine was in place the media presented Lyndon LaRouche as the face of libertarians.

most issues are more complex than 'for and against.' thus, the 'fairness doctrine' wasn't really fair at all.. all it did was provide a 'sensibility' sandbox that was defined by popularity, not truth. step outside the box, and you were censored anyway.

What would that have to do with the internet? The fairness doctrine was about preventing monopoly broadcasters from controlling public discourse. Since there is no such thing as a monopoly on internet broadcasting (unless ISPs start blocking your forum posts based on content), how is it even relevant? There is no scarcity of broadcast time on the internet, so the fairness doctrine doesn't even make sense.

I stand against the Fairness Doctrine because I see it as an adjustment to free speech. I'm not claiming it blocks free speech but I see it as detrimental because it partially instructs broadcasters what to present. On top of that, I think it's a little shortsighted and subjective in how it aims to enforce each broadcaster to pose all sides of the issue.

What I like about Clinton's suggestion (though flawed for many other reasons) is that it is a passive system. Anyone can say anything that they want

I don't know what we could do if we could not call the president a monkey without the opposing view that he is not in fact a simian. I do like the fact that liberal radio can call the current speak Boner without allowing corrections to his name, and talk about how Bonercare will solve everything. Fact based reporting is for the bygone era, and the fairness doctrine is not going to bring it back.

Inaft3r left-wingers project their half-truths and willful ignorance of past transgressions caused by government regulation. No, I'm not a right winger.

left and right wingers are stupid. please understand that for them the ideology comes first and they will defend it no matter how much it comes up short in a given situation.. it's nothing more than an emotionally driven religious fervor. it's also why people defend specific politicians no matter how stupid their actions.

and it's got nothing to do with ideology. It's all about practicality. Corporations have massive economic power. So much so that nothing else can stand against that power except the government. Nothing. This is not a false dichotomy, at least as far as I know. I don't know any other way to keep something as massive as a modern global corporation in check.

You can't just say the free market will sort it out, because the same people running one corporation are on the board of directors of the others. You can't stop buying from them and hope that'll keep them in check, because you'll have to buy from a "competitor" and that competitor is owned, through the stock market, by the same people. They're completely pervasive in our economy. In short, they're our ruling class, and we need government to replacement.

Given that much of Wikipedia is dominated by cliques of editors whose main preoccupation is to keep out competing edits (no matter how sensible those edits may be), and given there's a big difference between neutrality and objectivity, I hardly think Wikipedia is a good example of what Clinton is talking about.

I have yet to see that Wikipedia. I go to the one with people collaborating on making articles better. Yes, occasionally a jerk comes along and tries to push a particular point of view, but they generally come to their senses quickly or just go away, often after being blocked from editing.

It depends on where you go really. The main articles are usually well-written and sourced but in the fringe articles on controversial science, religion in the US or that explain the controversial practices of certain cults, editors with power come in and reverse edits that are not according to their belief system.

I have yet to see that Wikipedia. I go to the one with people collaborating on making articles better. Yes, occasionally a jerk comes along and tries to push a particular point of view, but they generally come to their senses quickly or just go away, often after being blocked from editing.

Where is that wikipedia? I didn't know there were two of them. What's the url? I can only find the one run by jackbooted, book-burning cliquish friends of Jimbo for their own ends and profit. And that one is pretty useless.

But hold on, "blocked from editing"? Could these be the same wikipedias? Looks like they could be. Are you a friend of Jimbo?

I have yet to see that Wikipedia. I go to the one with people collaborating on making articles better. Yes, occasionally a jerk comes along and tries to push a particular point of view, but they generally come to their senses quickly or just go away, often after being blocked from editing.

Purely in the name of sober second thought, you might want to consider - just for a moment - that you're already on the clique side looking out. I'm certainly not saying you are, but I think it is valid advice to anyone that says they don't see a particular societal problem, to also look in the mirror.

I've been pretty happy with wikipedias decisions on contentious issues, although I don't spend any time editing there. For example, they still show the cartoons here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy

As an outsider, my principle objections have always been when some really awesome & informative article gets scrubbed useless by astroturffers, BLP fags, deletionists, agenda pushing asshats, or simply idiots that don't under

You have -- people spend -- corporations and governments spend massive sums of money, you know, trying to protect their information. And look, this enlisted Army person blew through it all and dumped all that information on the Wiki Wiki Bus [wikimedia.org]. So that's troubling

I don't understand your PBS link. The article mentions that MoveOn advocated for public funding of Public Broadcasting, not PBS advocating for MoveOn. Some how you take an organizations(MoveOn) advocacy for a third party(PBS) and use that as evidence that the third party(PBS) is advocating for the other group(MoveOn.)

If this logic holds up does that mean that Palin supports neo-Nazi's as many of those groups supported her and McCain in the last election cycle?

...they can't independently go out and gather their own data they have to base their projections on the mis-information they are fed by the politicians and their staff.

[citation needed]

According to their own Web page [cbo.gov], "Budget and mandate cost estimates are based on the text of the proposed legislation...All CBO estimates and analytic products are reviewed internally for technical competence, accuracy of data, and clarity of exposition. CBO studies also are reviewed by outside experts..."